I’ve always had a certain fascination with crime stories.

It may be from my professional background — before returning to school for my journalism degree, I was a 911 operator. Alternatively, it may stem from my childhood dreams of being a cop, when I wasn’t dreaming of being an astronaut/being Gordie Howe/living in the Technodrome. Regardless, crime stories remain one of my favorite things to write about.

While Sammamish thankfully doesn’t have an ongoing stream of murders, beatings and public displays of redneck ignorance to keep me neck deep in police reports, I do read and type up the weekly Sammamish police blotter. In between thinking of my “witty” headlines, I do tend to notice little trends. Trends that make me bring whatever train of thought I am riding on to a screeching halt.

One such trend happened in last week’s blotter, specifically on Nov. 15. On that day, SPD responded to an awful lot of car prowls and outright thefts. All in the same general area, all with a similar connecting thread.

Unlocked vehicles. Open garages.

When I was a 911 operator, I worked in a small town just outside of a major city. It’s a fairly rural place, more cows than people, but within the last decade it had seen a boom of new city money bringing families out to McMansions to raise their kids in “safe, country homes away from the crime of the city.”

One day, a gentleman came in to the station while I was on duty. He had lived in town for less than 48 hours and was very nearly in tears. It seemed that overnight, thieves had stolen an 18-foot flatbed trailer from a fenced off portion of his backyard. While listening to him talk to the officer, the officer asked if the thieves damaged a lock. The flatbed owner said no, the fence was unlocked.

He then said “I moved out to the country to get away from this! I thought this was the kind of place you could leave your front door unlocked.”

That place, that glorified TV-ized image of America from the ‘50s? News flash, it doesn’t exist anymore, if it existed at all.

Thieves, at least the ones that don’t get caught, tend to be a paranoid lot. I can still hear my report writing instructor from my first stint through college as a Criminal Justice major, sitting in an un-airconditioned, windowless classroom in the hot Oklahoma summer, saying this over and over again. Even as I wrote those blotter entries last week, I could hear him saying those words over and over again.

It leaves me to wonder just how many of those thefts could have been avoided if people would lock their cars, remove their valuables, or stop leaving their garages open overnight.

It’s an attitude I find disturbingly pervasive, even from my own relatives. A few months ago, my mom’s car was ransacked in her driveway because she left it unlocked.

Yes, the police are there to respond to crimes and help in any way they can. That does not absolve us from taking some responsibility for the safety and security of our property, even if it just means taking five seconds to make sure the car’s locked up.

Bryan Trude is a reporter for the Issaquah/Sammamish Reporter, who primarily covers Sammamish, and is a little neurotic about making sure his car is locked unless he’s in it, not that there’s anything of value in there.